News that a COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German company BioNTech is 90% effective has been met with much excitement across the world. But the vaccine race is still very much on. Why? The world will need multiple vaccines for coronavirus as each vaccine will provide different levels of immunity, and therefore will be able to protect people at different risk levels safely. More than 170 teams are working to develop a vaccine, with 11 already in the final stages of human trials, and world leaders have pledged a total of $8 billion (£6.5bn) to the cause. Click or scroll through to see when the vaccines are projected to be available and the colossal sums of money involved. All dollar amounts in US dollars. 

The Gamaleya Institute in Russia surprised the world in August when it announced that a mass-vaccination plan was scheduled for October, despite its vaccine not having completed the three critical development phases strictly adhered to by most of the scientific community. The vaccine – named Sputnik V after the successful launch of the world’s first satellite by the Russians in 1957 – was declared as being 92% effective immediately after BioNTech and Pfizer’s announcement. 

This vaccine has yet to finish Phase 2 testing – which typically involves up to a couple of hundred participants in order to test the dosage levels – but is also carrying out Phase 3-style testing at the same time. The Gamaleya Institute is expecting to continue trials alongside the vaccination of medical workers. This Russian vaccine differs from most others in development, as it will require a second booster shot at a later date. Kirill Dmitriev (pictured), the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund that is financing the vaccine, suggested that Russia will be the first country to be immune to COVID-19. The country is also in the process of developing a second potential vaccine, Ifax, which completed its Phase 2 trials in September. Russia is experiencing a second wave of coronavirus, with the Kremlin describing the current rate of infection as "worrying".

American pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer teamed up with German immunotherapeutics specialists BioNTech to co-develop a Messenger RNA (mRNA)-based vaccine, which makes the body develop its own medicine. The collaboration was announced in March, and Pfizer was the second company to announce on 27 July that it was moving into Phase 3 trials. This week there was excitement across the world when it was announced that the drug had proved to be 90% effective in vaccinating more than 43,000 people against COVID-19. The companies are living up to initial projections that there was “potential” to supply millions of vaccinations by the end of 2020, and now estimate that it will be possible to produce 100 million doses in the next couple of months. This is likely to be ramped up, hopefully with the capacity to produce 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.

However, there are logistical issues surrounding the vaccine. The drug cannot be moved from a temperature of -70°C (-94°F) more than four times, much lower than the temperature an average domestic freezer can reach. This will make its transportation difficult, and on arrival many local medical services will not have the equipment in place to keep the drug that cool. After thawing the vaccine can last for five days. Pfizer also has an agreement with the US government's Operation Warp Speed in place, whereby the company will sell 600 million vaccines to the country for $1.95 billion (£1.5bn). Producing a successful vaccine can be a lucrative business, and BioNTech saw a 14% surge in its share price following the news, peaking at $114.46 (£86.38) on 9 November. It has also boosted the fortune of the Turkish-German couple who co-founded BioNTech in 2008, Dr Sahin and Dr Tureci, to more than $4 billion (£3bn) according to UK newspaper The Times.

There are several Chinese pharmaceutical companies working to produce a COVID-19 vaccine, including state-run Sinopharm, which is planning to have a drug ready for use in December. Sinopharm’s vaccine follows the most typical route for immunising against disease: the candidate contains a dead version of the virus, which prompts the body to produce an immune response. The company has been keen to test its vaccine, and Chinese state media reported that free vaccines were being offered to Chinese students planning on going abroad. More than 481,000 people were vaccinated, according to Sinpharm, before the programme was suspended and rumours circulated that it had been fake, as reported by UK newspaper The Guardian.

Although the first cases of coronavirus in the UK were only confirmed in late January, scientists in Oxford had already started working on a vaccination. This group is certainly a front-runner in the race to find a vaccine, having previously developed a vaccine for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), the coronavirus outbreak that hit Saudi Arabia in 2012, and it is continuing to see positive results with its current vaccine candidate, which is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector (ChAdOx1).

Following successful trials on six rhesus racaque monkeys in March, further testing on more than 1,000 healthy volunteers continued to show positive results. The vaccine is now in its final stage of development and is being tested on more than 20,000 volunteers across Brazil, South Africa, Kenya and the UK. Preliminary results will be available in November, and the head of the Oxford University group said there is a “small chance” that a vaccine could be ready before Christmas. The teams in Oxford have also formed a landmark partnership with global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for the future mass production and distribution of any vaccine produced, while the UK government has given the project £20 million ($24.7m) and has pre-ordered 100 million doses. In May, America's Operation Warp Speed put $1.2 billion (£915m) behind AstraZeneca and this vaccine, suggesting it is definitely a front-runner in the vaccine race.

Novavax is a clinical-stage biotechnology company split between Maryland in the US and Uppsala in Sweden. Its experts are specialists in the field of serious infectious diseases, and they have put together a potential vaccine called NVX-CoV2373. Novavax has used its nanoparticle technology to manufacture the drug, and it will include the company’s trademark adjuvant, an ingredient used in some vaccines to create a stronger immune response, Matrix-M to increase the production of antibodies.

When tested on animals the drug has shown itself to be an "ideal vaccine candidate", and the company moved onto human trials in late May. Gregory Glenn, the company’s MD and President of Research and Development, has cited funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) organisation, good initial results, and the "heroic efforts" of the team as reasons for the vaccine’s impressive projected progress. Novavax is another company to be involved with America’s Operation Warp Speed programme, which suggests that the vaccine, currently in the third and final stage of testing, should be appearing in early 2021. So far Novavax has received government funding of $1.6 billion (£1.2bn), despite never having actually brought a vaccine to market in its 33-year history.  

US biotech company Moderna was quick off the mark with its research and development, and within 25 days of the Chinese authorities having shared the genetic sequence of COVID-19, the company had completed its first clinical batch of vaccine ready for analytical testing. The batch was then shipped to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), where a Phase 1 clinical study was underway by the end of February. It was the first company to do so. The first dose of the company’s candidate drug, mRNA-1273, was administered to healthy volunteers by mid-March. Human trials on adult volunteers continued over six weeks, with all 45 subjects producing encouraging immune responses.

Although Moderna already had its mRNA platform in place before this coronavirus spread, this is the first time that it has been tested on humans, and although the company has experience with similar vaccines, it has never brought one to the market before. On 27 July, the company was one of two to announce that it would be commencing Phase 3 of development. Efforts have been made to include people at the highest risk from COVID-19 and those who are typically underrepresented in medical trials, including diabetics, people who are severely obese and people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Moderna is working in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, and has also signed a deal with Swiss drugmaker Lonza, which would allow production of up to a billion doses of the vaccine a year. That said, Moderna hasn’t seen a huge spike in its share price, which currently sits at $76.05 (£57.32) at the time of writing (11 November).

Johnson & Johnson, one of the biggest names in the healthcare sector, together with the US government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), has committed over $1 billion (£799m) to developing a COVID-19 vaccine. By the end of March, the company had announced its lead candidate vaccine, and on 30 July it revealed promising results from tests carried out on primates. Multi-country Phase 3 trials started in September, and will involve around 60,000 volunteers testing the single-dose drug. An “adverse event” during testing caused trials to be paused in mid-October, but they were underway again by the end of the month. Johnson & Johnson has also emphasised that testing the vaccine on populations that have been disproportionately affected by the virus, such as Black and Hispanic communities in the US, is a priority. 

Having also been recruited to America’s Operation Warp Speed, Johnson & Johnson anticipates that its vaccine could be ready for use by early 2021, and the company intends to scale up its manufacturing so that it's capable of supplying countries all over the world. Given the current state of emergency, Johnson & Johnson is also one of several companies to have offered its future vaccine to America at its manufacturing cost, rather than seeking to profit from the global crisis. The company has a broad portfolio that covers consumer health, medical devices and pharmaceuticals, meaning that business has both boomed and seen a decline across Johnson & Johnson during the pandemic. The pausing of trials saw the company’s share price dip, but it is gradually climbing back up, currently sitting at $148.28 (£111.76) at the time of writing (11 November).

Finding vaccinations that work against cancers and infectious diseases is the usual remit of this American biotechnology company, but Inovio has stepped up to the coronavirus challenge. On 6 April, the company initiated the Phase 1 clinical trial of its potential vaccine, and 40 healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Kansas City were tested. By the end of June an impressive 94% of participants had shown effective immune responses six weeks after being vaccinated. Inovio will soon begin its Phase 2 testing in the Middle East.

Inovio hopes to have a million doses of the drug ready for additional trials and emergency use by the end of 2020, and is also part of the US Government’s Operation Warp Speed. Inovio’s share price is among the lowest of the vaccine-developing companies at $8.50 (£6.43).

GlaxoSmithKline is one of the best-known names in pharmaceuticals, and the company is responsible for a huge number of medications that we already depend upon, such as malaria and HPV vaccinations. Sanofi is headquartered in France and is equally relentless when it comes to eradicating illness with its medicines. An alliance between two companies that normally compete aggressively on vaccine development is unprecedented, but is indicative of just how serious a global health emergency this is. Together, the companies have the largest capability for producing vaccines in the world, which is a significant factor given that the rollout of this vaccine needs to be global, requiring hundreds of millions of doses. A candidate vaccine entered Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials in September, with the companies hoping to have moved into the final Phase 3 trials by December. 

The partnership is working on an adjuvanted vaccine: a combination of an antigen, which stimulates an immune response and produces antibodies, and an adjuvant which boosts that immune response. This means less antigen will be required per dose so more vaccine doses can be manufactured. On 29 July the UK confirmed a deal for 60 million doses of the vaccine at a cost of £500 million ($650m), while on 31 July the US government bought 100 million doses of the vaccine, with the option to secure 500 million more, for $2.1 billion (£1.6bn). To date this is the largest amount of funding released by America's Operation Warp Speed programme. A similar deal has been reached with the Canadian government. Recent reports suggest that GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi will be able to produce a billion doses in 2021. However GlaxoSmithKline has seen its share price drop as it halted production of its other vaccines to focus on the COVID-19 crisis, and it anticipates that this year’s earnings will suffer as a result. GSK’s share price currently sits at £1,479.40 ($1,962), while Sanofi is at €87.30 ($102.64/£77.50) as of 11 November.

German clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company CureVac specialises in pioneering mRNA-based drugs. In mid-March, the company confirmed that it would be turning its focus to developing a coronavirus vaccine, and expects data on its effectiveness, based on trials taking place in Peru and Panama, by the end of 2020. In June, the German government invested €300 million ($355m/£270m) in the project. CureVac's vaccine – called CVnCoV – was not the first to go into human trials, but the company’s CEO Franz-Werner Haas expects the vaccine to be ready for public use by mid-2021. He has said that a dose will cost between €15 and €20 (approximately $17.50-$23.50/£13-£18).

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It's not just the German government backing CureVac. The EU's lending arm the European Investment Bank approved a €75 million ($82m/£66m) investment into the company. The funding is made up of three installments of €25 million ($29m/£23m) based on milestones in the development process. CureVac is looking at production and distribution methods for its future vaccine, and at the start of July a new partnership with electric car manufacturer Tesla was unveiled. Telsa is building printers that are capable of reproducing CureVac’s vaccine candidate, and is currently experimenting with its third version of the machine, which company CEO Elon Musk has predicted will be an “important product for the world”. CureVac has a long history of working on mRNA-based vaccines, having recently developed a successful anti-rabies programme, and hoped to be the first to bring an mRNA-based vaccine to the market, but it looks as though it has been beaten...

Biopharmaceutical companies Dynavax Technologies Corporation and Sinovac Biotech Ltd. have also formed a partnership to develop a vaccine. Sinovac provides biopharmaceutical products in China, while Californian company Dynavax’s strengths lie in developing and commercialising innovative vaccines. The drug will consist of Sinovac’s coronavirus vaccine candidate with the addition of Dynavax’s adjuvant. Prior to the pandemic, this ingredient was only approved in an adult Hepatitis B vaccine, but it's thought that it will also be successful in immunising people against COVID-19.

Phase 3 trials on Sinovac’s candidate commenced in mid-July in Brazil, one of the countries worst affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as in Indonesia and Turkey. The study intended to vaccinate 9,000 healthcare professionals working on the frontline with coronavirus patients, but trials have been suspended in Brazil due to a “severe adverse event” on 29 October. The event was not linked to the COVID-19 vaccine itself, according to the director of Brazil's Butantan biomedical institute, but it will undoubtedly have slowed down the companies’ progress. Sinovac’s home country China has also loaned $1 billion (£770m) to South America and the neighbouring Caribbean islands for access to the vaccine when it is ready.

US biotech company Heat Biologics and the University of Miami are using Heat’s gp96 platform to research and produce a vaccine. The platform has already been used to tackle SIV/HIV, zika and malaria, and Heat announced that it would start working towards a COVID-19 vaccine with the university back in March.

The focus of the programme is to insert different protein regions of the virus into the platform, which should generate long-term immune responses that could be effective against multiple strands of coronavirus. At the end of August, Heat Biologics reported that pre-clinical testing was going well, with the candidate vaccine effectively producing an immune response with just one dose. The company's CEO Jeff Wolf has also said that this vaccine would be particularly well-suited to the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. If a company's share price indicates how successful a vaccine is likely to be, Heat Biologics isn't set to be the first to crack the market, with a share costing just $1.04 (£0.78) at the time of writing, after it nearly slid off the Nasdaq listing completely in July by not meeting the market's $1 minimum per share rule. 

GeoVax is a US biotechnology company that develops human immunotherapies and vaccines against cancers and infectious diseases. When scientists in Wuhan released the genome code for COVID-19, GeoVax agreed to collaborate with Chinese vaccine developer BravoVax. Under the arrangement, BravoVax will provide testing and manufacturing support in China to GeoVax once it has produced suitable vaccine candidates. Smallpox (pictured) and monkeypox vaccines produced by GeoVax have also been approved for distribution by the US Food and Drug Administration in the last year – successful outcomes the company is hoping to replicate with its COVID-19 efforts.

During a presentation on emerging infectious diseases, GeoVax’s former chief scientific officer Farshad Guirakhoo (pictured) highlighted that the viral basis of GeoVax’s vaccine vector already had 50 years of safety records, and so the company’s vaccine should be able to become a licensed drug much quicker than new, unproven technologies proposed by other companies. That said, as of the end of October the various candidates were still being tested on animals, which leaves it lagging behind other companies. Despite its work on the biggest issue of 2020, GeoVax's value hasn't benefitted from the pandemic, with its share price currently sitting at $2.73 (£2.06).

US biotechnology company Vaxart specialises in oral vaccines, rather than the more common injections, and in March it announced that it was working on an oral tablet that would immunise patients against COVID-19. Vaxart has joined forces with biopharm company Emergent BioSolutions Inc., and the companies plan to pool their knowledge of oral vaccinations and 'molecule-to-market’ development and manufacturing resources to produce a vaccine designed to help the masses. This is another project that has been given the US Government stamp of approval with inclusion in the flagship Operation Warp Speed initiative, and as a result Vaxart saw its shares value soar by 66% in June. 

An oral vaccine has huge advantages over a more traditional vaccine in terms of logistics, according to Wouter Latour, the CEO of Vaxart. A room temperature-stable tablet would be much easier to roll out on a large scale, but that does make it trickier to produce. Development of the drug has already started, and the first human was given the tablet for Phase 1 trials in October following successful trials on hamsters. As well as working with Vaxart, Emergent BioSolutions has signed a $628 million (£480m) deal with the US Operation Warp Speed initiative to scale production of vaccine candidates, and has also partnered with Johnson & Johnson and Novavax to assist with rolling out their vaccines when the time comes. In June, the company also signed a $87 million (£67m) manufacturing deal with AstraZeneca, followed by a further $174 million (£134m) deal in late July.

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In 2014, Chinese pharmaceuticals firm CanSino Biologics was the third company to develop a vaccine against Ebola. The company is hoping for similar success in producing a COVID-19 vaccine, having entered Phase 3 clinical trials in July, in collaboration with the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology. 

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Experts have recently expressed concerns that CanSino’s vaccine, which is based on the common cold virus, could be limited in its effectiveness against the highly-contagious coronavirus. Trials are currently being carried out in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and in China, on soldiers from the country’s People’s Liberation Army. While it hasn’t been specified which units will be used for trials, officials have said that there hasn’t been a single case of coronavirus within the country’s army.

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